US civil rights hero James Lawson dies at 95
James Lawson, the Black civil rights activist who traveled to India to study non-violent protest and served as the chief strategist for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., has passed away at the age of 95.
A Methodist minister, Lawson absorbed Mahatma Gandhi’s principles of civil disobedience and imparted them to protesters fighting racial segregation in the United States.
Through his workshops, he taught numerous activists how to peacefully resist severe violence and threats from the police and hostile white mobs, thereby highlighting the immorality of racism.
Dr. King frequently lauded Lawson’s methods, describing him in a speech the day before his assassination as one of the great “noble men” of the Black struggle in America.
King, who met Lawson when they were both 28, also referred to him as “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.”
Lawson passed away in Los Angeles, where he resided, his family announced on Monday.
Born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in 1928, he was the son and grandson of ministers.
Lawson recounted that his motivation to study non-violence began at the age of eight, after he slapped a child who had called him a racial slur.
His mother, who was a passivist, asked him “what good” had become of his response. He vowed to never again use violence to resolve a dispute.
His non-violent beliefs were tested early on, when as a university student he refused to be drafted into the US Army to serve in the Korean War.
Lawson served 13 months in prison for draft dodging. After finishing his education, he travelled to Nagpur, India, to work as a missionary and study the resistance tactics developed by Gandhi.
After three years in India, he returned to the US, where he met King, a fellow Methodist minister, at Oberlin College in Ohio.
His belief in non-violence came at a time when opinion in black communities was divided over how to resist institutional racism and segregation.
King convinced Lawson to move to Nashville and begin studying at Vanderbilt University while also teaching non-violent protest techniques.
Several of his students went on to play prominent roles in the civil rights movement, such as future congressman John Lewis and future Washington DC mayor Marion Barry.
After King was assassinated in 1968, Lawson met and eventually befriended the man convicted of killing him.
“Martin King would have gone to visit him. I knew this,” he said of James Earl Ray, King’s killer.
Lawson went on to officiate Ray’s marriage in prison, and came to believe that he was not solely responsible for King’s death.
He was also a founder of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which played a key role in the racial equality protests of the 1960s.
In a 2020 speech during the funeral of John Lewis, Lawson said “many of us had no choice to do what we tried to do, primarily because at an early age we recognized the wrong under which we were forced to live”.
“And we swore to God that by God’s grace, we would do whatever God called us to do in order to put on the table of the nation’s agenda.
